Maxwell Goes Mobile as Nvidia Launches GeForce GTX 970M and 980M GPUs

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Brace yourself for a barrage of laptops with Maxwell inside

When Nvidia unveiled its first Maxwell-based graphics cards during its GAME24 event, the company trumpeted increased performance alongside power efficiency, allowing for high-end video cards that run cooler and quieter. That's the kind of combination that's ideal for mobile gamers, and if you've been waiting for Maxwell to arrive on laptops, your wait is over -- Nvidia this morning launched its GeForce GTX 970M and 980M notebook GPUs.
"Let’s start with some history. Nvidia’s 8th-generation GPU architecture, Fermi, delivered about 40 percent of the desktop equivalent in 2010. Kepler, our 9th generation GPU, launched in 2010, closed the gap to 60 percent, giving gamers 1080p resolution and 'ultra' settings for the first time in a notebook," Nvidia explained in a blog post.
"With Maxwell, that gap shrinks to 80 percent of the desktop equivalent and pushes the resolution well beyond 1080p. It’s an astonishing achievement when you compare the thermal and power differences in a desktop tower and a notebook chassis," Nvidia continued.
The GeForce GTX 980M wields 1536 CUDA cores with a base clockspeed of 1038MHz and unspecified boost clockspeed. It uses GDDR5 memory clocked at 2500MHz on a 256-bit bus, which translates into 160GB/s of memory bandwidth. All the latest APIs and technologies are supported, such as Optimus, GameStream, ShadowPlay, DirectX 12, OpenGL 4.4, OpenCL 1.1, PCI Express 3.0, and so forth.
Nvidia's GTX 970M is slightly toned down with 1280 CUDA cores with a base clockspeed of 924MHz, also with an unspecified boost clock. The biggest difference between the two is that the memory travels through a 192-bit bus and tops out at 120GB/s of memory bandwidth.
According to Nvidia, both GPUs are capable of rendering games at up to 4K resolution. Since most laptops don't support resolutions above 1920x1080, the Maxwell parts use something called Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) to render games at the higher res and then scale them down. Nvidia says this results in superior image quality than rendering directly to 1080p and considers it Maxwell's most exciting new technology.
Look for notebooks equipped with the new GeForce GTX 980M and 970M GPUs to start shipping today.
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